Age is Just a Number

Pick Me! Pick Me!

Every year at Christmastime, in our office, we get shipments of various kinds of goodies from partners, vendors or other business folk who want to stay in our good graces.   You know what it looks like:   the ginormous 5 gallon bucket of 3 flavor popcorn, or the basket of trail mix, and even selections of delectable chocolates and nuts.   I don’t know what happened this last year, but it was an off year.   I’m thinking it’s because 2007 is a prime number.  Anyway, about half of the bounty was rather, uh, unpalatable.   This is measured, of course, by what goes first … and what’s still there on January 15th.

One attractive basket contained ‘food items’ from an earthy bakery – scones that really needed a beverage to go with them, muffins that weighed about 3 lbs. and some sort of Galaxy Brownies in suspicious boxes.  I think those got moldy before they got rejected.  Taffy was a late hanger-on, and hard candies are a hard sell, but they go well in the dish out front for unsuspecting visitors to the office.

As I peer out my office door, I can see 5 little matching boxes stacked pyramid style still remaining on the big table.   This is what’s left of the Christmas Bounty.   They bring to mind the poor little kid who is the last picked in P.E. class for whatever game is being played that day.   The scrawny, unpopular one with glasses;  I know, I was one.  However I wasn’t dressed up in pretty paper, matching the other unwanted, scrawny kids.   These boxes – we can’t decide if they are candy or fruit – contain "Aplets" and "Cotlets".   They are gelatinous, chewy, chocolate covered or sugar covered, masses of Apple or Apricot gooey gel.   They are the unwanted, unpopular, spectacled kids in P.E. class.   The game is done, we’ve moved on, and they’re still sitting on the sidelines hoping for acceptance.   I am not mean to candy, so I won’t be throwing them out.   However, I know our office mom will swoop in one day and they’ll be gone, cute little boxes and all.   I’ve seen her eye them the last couple days, and even linger once or twice, pondering.

I feel for the little guys.   They’ll never be in the Chocolate League.

Is Your 6th Grader Ready?

Portland, Maine's King Middle School wants their kids to be "treated" and protected ....

Read about it here.

Together-ness, or Alone-ness

While listening to Scott teach last Sunday about Going it Alone or Together the image of a story my dad told me flooded into my mind from who knows which archive buried in my brain.

He was in the Army in WWII and happened to be a smoker at the time. One day while in the middle of Africa he decided to quit. No patches, no support group or special gum. He just decided in his mind that he was done smoking. He told me that "the guys" would taunt him and try to get him to smoke – shaking their packs at him and other nonsense. After getting enough of it, at some point, while driving a truck ( I think an ammunition truck!) down a dusty road, he pulled his gun on one of them and told him "if you do that again I’ll shoot you".

I heard many stories from my dad about how he used brute force to solve his problems, so it didn’t shock me in any way to hear that. He was raised in rough times; in an orphanage, in foster homes, out on his own…on into the Army, nearly mortally injured, sent home to recover or die. What I was always impressed by – meaning, as a kid I was truly Impressed – is that he was able, by his own strength, to make up his mind and just do it; he set his mind and the task was done. I inherited that trait. I have always been proud of that trait.

Play - alone.
Move out on my own – alone.
Go to college – alone.
Take care of business – alone.
Make small and large decisions – alone.
Home repairs, car repairs, bodily damage repairs – alone.
Live – alone…. All until my late 30’s.

The toughest challenge is to live with another person well. I became aware on Sunday just how much my dad’s example has penetrated my character; how much it has possibly hindered my relationships, how much it has probably hurt me.

Going it alone has advantages, as Scott said. My mood affected no one – it didn’t bounce off anybody to come back and nail me. Life wasn’t so messy, it was simpler. It was soooo much simpler. I once told spouse-man the best vacation would be if he went somewhere with the girls for a week … and I got to stay home. Is that bad?

Now I am wondering and pondering about 1. being Proud of the trait and 2. the Trait itself. It is difficult to reach out and depend on other people, especially when God gave me so many physical talents and abilities to do things myself. Reaching out emotionally has netted great, great disappointment in the past. I find that people are quick to jump in to help with material things when someone is in need, but shy away from helping relationally - like schools of fish when you dip below the surface and swim near them. So I wonder how many others out there inherited a similar trait - one that keeps all of us hovering at a distance like a school of barracudas?

Playing Tennis Alone

Sometimes it’s like I am playing tennis by myself. Raise the racket, whack the ball down the court and expect it to come back. But it doesn’t. Is there anyone out there – on the other side of the net? Whack the ball again. Nothing comes back. I see this in the form of leaving a message – with no call back. Email – hit send, and nothing comes back. Send a gift via snailmail – no response. I expect that others will respond when I lay something out there. My stepdaughter is an example of this – I talk to her and there is no response. I ask her questions and get a shrug. I extend an invite and hear I don’t know (I typically respond to that with You’re the only one who knows what’s inside your brain!). Okay, so all this could add up to teenage hormones and lack of communicative skills. However, I’ve met plenty of other teenagers who are pretty good with the racket and gettin’ the ball back over the net. But this applies to adults too.

I recently read an article about Negotiating. That is one of those words that bring a subconscious wave of gut swirling misery – it summons a picture of greasy haired car salesmen playing gatekeeper to the car you want, or investment opportunists who want you to buy into their wealth building program or else you’ll die in poverty and a pile of food stamps. The discomfort is right up there with having to address people in the form of a speech. Negotiations occur everyday though, and I hadn’t thought of that; work, marriage, all kinds of relationships. What I learned in this article is basically there are two types: the Transaction View and the Relationship View. The Transaction View is where one gives up and the other one gains – not the type of negotiation that will likely cause you to encounter that person again. It’s the what’s in it for me mindset. The Relationship view is all about building the relationship, like in business or marriage; where both parties will get something out of it, and it will be ongoing. Ongoing….happening again in the future.

It seems to me that many of my encounters are of the Transaction View. I’ve pondered this a long time. I am innately curious about people. I want the tennis ball to come back, and doggone it, I even want to hit it back again – conversationally speaking that is. I want the Ongoing…the Relationship View. Maybe I don’t do it right, maybe the ball hits the net when I think it has sailed over and I am waiting when all along it is sitting in my court….but I took tennis lessons – really! - It can’t always be the case. Maybe my tennis ball is flat and peters out before it gets to the other person. Maybe it has too much dog slobber on it and nobody wants to touch it. I am the common denominator here afterall.

The problem with playing tennis alone is eventually you get tired and go sit on the bench for a rest. After a while it isn’t worth chasing after all the balls laying around the tennis court – and the bench gets glued to your hiney.

Homogenized in the USA

IHOP is buying Applebee’s. I know this because spouse-man got a subscription to the Wall Street Journal as a graduation gift, and he reads to me, or otherwise relays to me, interesting local and world news tidbits. Applebee’s set the standard for the what-is-now typical and standard restaurant: similar menu, similar seating setup, etc., and they were very successful, so successful that that is why everyone else copied them. But it became diluted, other restaurants changed with the times, but Applebee’s didn’t, so they drifted to the bottom and are now being bought out by IHOP.

It got me thinking about similar scenarios such as Ford buying up other car manufacturers (and, interestingly, selling them all off now) and I wonder just how diluted we will become before it all ends. Like just one giant grocery store chain - because Safeway bought Albertson's who had already bought Smiths and Piggly Wiggly - offering coupons for Pop-Tarts and Hamburger Helper, forcing the consumer to fit to their mold - you gotta eat Pop-Tarts or else you won’t get the discount! (I don’t see coupons for, say, organic green beans, what’s up with that?). How about one single, giant box, home improvement store named Lowe’s Depot, or maybe we’ll get memberships at Cost Club or SamsCo – who will buy who? (or is it Whom?) One giant chain Wal-Store. Is it a chain, then, if there is only one name to choose from? Maybe we’ll end up with Rite-greens in the end. We’ve already got Taco Bell and Pizza cohabitating; when will Macaroni Grill and Olive Garden share real estate – a little gastronomic courtyard called Macaroni Garden...

Then there is the symbol recognition marketing tactic. Think Nike. We just drove down the road and on the corner there was a giant lime green circle with the words next to it: Coming Soon! What is coming soon – the lime store? The lime green circle store? The polka-dot store in lime green only? I don’t know that symbol, so for them, they lose out because I don’t know what I am suppose to get ramped up about.

It troubles me, although I don’t lose sleep over it, that it is all becoming diminished, diluted and depreciating in character and personality. World economy, business and finance – and politics - are sooo not my bailiwick, and I don’t claim to have some sort of explanation other than it all seems to come down to whoever makes the most money in the end wins. Like Monopoly: Give me Park Place for $350 million, please.

Where Have all the Snowmen Gone?

After posting new pics on the left, I realized I have not seen any snowmen in all these footages of snow over the last 2 weeks.   Is everyone so tired from shoveling that building snowmen are out of the question?  Surely the kids didn't shovel that much to be too tired.   I wonder if everyone got so many cool gifts that they are happy to be inside.   One of my coolest gifts?  A docking station/speaker/recharge/new age looking thingy for my iPod by Klipsch - sounds better than our regular speakers.

 

Indebtedness

This morning on NPR, there was a short article on the ability to choose, with technology, whether your baby will be a boy or a girl.   Ohhh, I don’t want to go there, but what else peaked my interest was that the particular couple who were interviewed said that they paid the $12,000 fee with “some savings and a credit card” – in order to have a girl because she had two boys already.   The savings used could have been $1 or $11,999.   One, that’s a lot of dough to take control over your choice to paint the baby room pink or blue, and Two, that’s a lot of dough!



I just did a Google search on “credit card debt statistics”.   None of what I found is a surprise to anybody.   Also, I just finished reading a small book “Green With Envy”.   Initially I checked it out from the library to get a glimpse of how people are affording all the toys and keeping their necks above water.   In short, of course they aren’t!   Partly, this recent read stems from my personal pains with The Mother and her observed lifestyle mysteriously connected with the funds we give her monthly.   And, the answer all funnels back into the same pot:   Generally, most of us are not good stewards of Money.   I don’t want to beat up anyone who has mastered this, or otherwise works very hard for their paycheck and/or has some real setbacks to struggle with.

I think my beef hovers around a basic fact that there is difference between a Want and a Need.   And, there is a good amount of rationalization going on out there fashioning the wants into needs.   Here’s a learning opportunity I had:   Ice Cream in our house is a “want” - otherwise categorized as a “luxury”.   A couple summers ago, when both girls were at our house on a regular basis I started out the summer break with two half gallons of Ice Cream – probably Dryer’s or Bryer’s – the ones with the fewest ingredients.   Feeling generous I tossed them in the cart, as they were on sale, two for one.   By weeks end, they were gone.   I questioned that bit, moved on and eventually hit another sale, feeling generous again.   Of course, the ice cream disappeared, so this time I put it on the list.   The next shopping trip I bought a half gallon.   The pattern continued; I put it on the list again.   Toward the end of summer, the oldest teen, in all her teen glory, made a statement while digging out a scoop (or three) of ice cream that went something like this:   “I hate this stuff, why can’t you buy the cheap stuff that is easy to scoop out?!”   How many things did I become aware of in that one fell scoop?

1. You can’t please a Teen
2. Ahhh, I get it:  the “cheap stuff” aka “Soft Serve” aka “Little effort for Big reward”.
3. The produce in the bin in the fridge was not getting consumed.
4. Then why am I buying Ice Cream at all?
5. When did I start automatically adding this to the grocery list as if it were a Need?

The Want got transformed into a Need.

So I step back from the picture a bit more and remember that None of This is Ours in the first place.   And how much do I really Need to be happy anyway?  Am I weird that I actually like making homemade bread?

Hebrews 13:5 tells us:

Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."

I know I have too much stuff, and our cars get us where we want and the pantry is full.   So we go to a movie about once a year, and I find ways to entertain myself in the backyard with dirt – does that mean that I’ve sold out and settled for nothing?  Maybe some folks just need more to be entertained.   Maybe the budget category is different for others – I spend where others don’t, and vice versa.

I suppose my real questions might vaguely be, if you have 18 different loans for the RV, the Jet Ski, the 3 cars and hottub – is it wrong to have the debt if you have the means and discipline to pay it?   Are you still being a good steward if you have debt?   And if you have the means to pay the debt, then why have the debt?

Ecclesiastes 5:10
Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless.




This post does not reflect my ability or inability to have or pay debt, nor my status, wealth or poorness factor.

An Odyssey

We have an exhibit at the Museum of Nature and Science called Space Odyssey.  I have not been myself, but my husband and his girls have been there.  His report was that it was "disappointing and boring" (excuse me, Dear, if I didn't get the right words, but you get the gist).  I have been wondering why an intelligent person would find boring or disappointing something that some committee somewhere put their heads together to design, lobby for $, and build for the cultural community and public entertainment (we're not talking Six Flags here).  You'd think we'd hear about it in the newspapers.

I have a friend who's entire family volunteers at this museum, particularly at the Odyssey; they've been trained and have been doing it for years, just about every weekend.  She said "Were there volunteers there running the exhibits when they went?  Did they interact with the exhibits?  If not, then it would be boring!".  Here's my perfect segue to my point...how predictable was that?

Bored, boring, being bored is not of my vocabulary, I truly don't comprehend "boring". 
I see folks at church who don't appear to like to sing, they don't appear to show deference in bowing a head or closing an eye during prayer, and they seem to find interest for a long time in the bulletin.  I know some of them.  I wonder; if they appear so bored, then why show up?   Now I may be a bit judgemental here...these are my observations.  How can this Planet be boring?

I have found that when you make an investment, interact, be curious, ask questions, step out of your box or in any other way put yourself out there you begin to sense ownership and that means being a part of something; belonging.   For me, that's what life is all about.